UC Irvine UC Irvine Previously Published Works Title Who is susceptible in three false memory tasks? Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/34d2k097 Journal Memory (Hove, England), 27(7) ISSN 0965-8211 Authors Nichols, Rebecca M Loftus, Elizabeth F Publication Date 2019-08-01 DOI 10.1080/09658211.2019.1611862 Peer reviewed eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Memory ISSN: 0965-8211 (Print) 1464-0686 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/pmem20 Who is susceptible in three false memory tasks? Rebecca M. Nichols & Elizabeth F. Loftus To cite this article: Rebecca M. Nichols & Elizabeth F. Loftus (2019) Who is susceptible in three false memory tasks?, Memory, 27:7, 962-984, DOI: 10.1080/09658211.2019.1611862 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09658211.2019.1611862 Published online: 02 May 2019. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 182 View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=pmem20 MEMORY 2019, VOL. 27, NO. 7, 962–984 https://doi.org/10.1080/09658211.2019.1611862 Who is susceptible in three false memory tasks? Rebecca M. Nicholsa and Elizabeth F. Loftusb aSchool of Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore; bPsychology and Social Behavior, University of California, Irvine, CA, USA ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY Decades of research show that people are susceptible to developing false memories. But if Received 22 January 2019 they do so in one task, are they likely to do so in a different one? The answer: “No”.In Accepted 16 April 2019 the current research, a large number of participants took part in three well-established KEYWORDS false memory paradigms (a misinformation task, the Deese-Roediger-McDermott [DRM] list False memory; memory learning paradigm, and an imagination inflation exercise) as well as completed several ff distortion; misinformation; individual di erence measures. Results indicate that many correlations between false DRM; imagination inflation; memory variables in all three inter-paradigm comparisons are null, though some small, individual differences; false positive, significant correlations emerged. Moreover, very few individual difference variables memory susceptibility significantly correlated with false memories, and any significant correlations were rather small. It seems likely, therefore, that there is no false memory “trait”. In other words, no one type of person seems especially prone, or especially resilient, to the ubiquity of memory distortion. As much as we would like to believe so, human memory is The misinformation effect not the foolproof gatekeeper of our past. Though our memories generally serve us well in our day-to-day lives Background and theory and contribute meaning to ourselves and the physical One commonly used paradigm involves exposure to misin- and social environments in which we are so deeply formation about a past memory (Loftus, Miller, & Burns, embedded, we do not encode and retrieve in a failsafe 1978). In a typical misinformation study, participants record-and-playback manner. Rather, our memory pro- witness some type of event and later are given some mis- cesses can be vulnerable to contamination and distortion. information (i.e., inconsistent post-event information) Our memories are malleable, susceptible to influence from about that event. When tested on their memory for suggestion, and can even contain whole events that never event details, participants often incorporate pieces of mis- actually occurred. information into their memory of the original event and The past four decades have seen an explosion of report those details as such. For example, participants in research investigating the psychological underpinnings one study viewed a slideshow in which a burglar picked of faulty memory (for a review of some of this work up a hammer, then sometime later read misleading infor- and its motivations, see Brainerd & Reyna, 2005 or mation that the burglar handled a screwdriver instead. At Loftus, 2017). This collective body of work has shown test, they were asked whether they saw a hammer or a that memories can be manipulated experimentally. This screwdriver in the original slideshow. Across experiments, holds for memories of simple events created in the lab participants selected the misinformation item – the screw- and memories for perceptually rich and personally mean- driver – 66% of the time, representing a typical pattern of ingful events from one’s past. What’s less known, memory impairment in misinformation studies (McCloskey however, is whether individuals who are particularly & Zaragoza, 1985). prone to developing false memories in one context are One of the predominant theoretical explanations for the also prone to developing phenomenologically different misinformation effect is that of errors in source monitoring false memories in other contexts. We examined this (Johnson, Hashtroudi, & Lindsay, 1993). The source moni- issue using three commonly used paradigms for demon- toring account states that when participants encode the strating memory malleability. We describe their methods, misinformation, they may not adequately encode the their theoretical bases, and individual differences that source of the post-event information and thus erroneously predict susceptibility below. attribute it to the original event (for reviews, see Belli & CONTACT Rebecca M. Nichols [email protected] School of Social Sciences HSS-04-26, Nanyang Technological University, 48 Nanyang Avenue, Singapore 639818, Singapore This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article. © 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group MEMORY 963 Loftus, 1994; Mitchell & Johnson, 2000; Zaragoza, Lane, effect. For example, working memory has been shown to Ackil, & Chambers, 1997). This can easily happen because be negatively correlated with misinformation-related false the original information and misinformation share some memory (Calvillo, 2014; Jaschinski & Wentura, 2002). Rela- commonalities (e.g., the referent event and the context in tively low intelligence coupled with poor perceptual which those events occur) that inherently make source dis- capacity is also associated with susceptibility to misinfor- tinction difficult. Johnson et al. (1993) identified a number mation (Zhu et al., 2010a). More specifically, individuals of conditions in which source misattributions are particu- with a low degree of cognitive ability combined with larly likely, which include imagining perceptual detail at traits such as low fear of negative evaluation, low need the time of encoding misinformation, encoding misinfor- to avoid harm, high cooperativeness, high dependence mation that is particularly congruent with the overall on reward, and high self-directedness seemed to be meaning of the event, and experiencing stress or fatigue especially susceptible to the influence of misinformation during encoding of the misinformation. (Zhu et al., 2010b). It may be the case that a specific Another approach to explaining misinformation false threshold of cognitive ability is required both to accurately memories is fuzzy trace theory (FTT; Brainerd & Reyna, recall witnessed events and to discern the sources of 2005). FTT posits two types of mental representations for potentially competing information about those events. memory: verbatim traces, which are detailed, often vivid, direct representations of the past, and gist traces, which The Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm capture overall meaning of the memory but not its specific qualities. According to FTT, endorsement of misin- Background and theory formation is supported by both verbatim and gist trace Nearly twenty years after the misinformation effect was strength. An individual may misremember the item as a demonstrated, Roediger and McDermott rediscovered the screwdriver because they recall this verbatim information work of Deese (1959) and developed what became from the misinformation phase, or they may misremember another widely used experimental manipulation designed the item as a screwdriver because it is consistent with the to induce false memories, the Deese-Roediger-McDermott overall gist memory that the item was a tool. (or DRM) paradigm (Roediger & McDermott, 1995; Stadler, Roediger, & McDermott, 1999). In the DRM, participants Individual differences view or hear lists of semantically-related words such as Compared to the large corpus of research on the misinfor- note, sound, piano, sing, radio, band, etc., which converge mation effect, relatively few studies explore individual upon a critical, non-presented semantic associate (in this differences in susceptibility. Age is one of them; older case, music). Participants are tested on their memory for adults have shown to be more susceptible to memory studied items, new but unrelated control (distractor) items, errors, and this is likely because of decreased frontal lobe and of most interest, critical items. The rate of false mem- functioning and thus poorer source memory discriminabil- ories for critical items during encoding often approximates ity (Roediger & Geraci, 2007). Other research has shown or exceeds that of veridical memory for studied items, and that people who report stronger ability to imagine visual these patterns have been robustly replicated in the DRM lit- images are more likely to endorse misinformation (Cann erature